Cruetzfeld-Jacob Disease and CJD Voice

James,
While many of the precise details still remain unknown, all of the
epidemiological and molecular evidence supports the prion hypothesis.
Many excellant reviews have been published over the past few years,
the most recent being Prusiner, 1997, Science 278:245.
There are, in short, two theories:
(1) template assistance: mixing of normal prion proteins with scrapie
prions proteins results in the formation of hetrodimers, which
dissociate, releasing new scrapie prions.
(2) Nucleated polymerization: Similar to crystal seeding.
There is also the possibility of a chaperone protein which may
participate in the induced folding of normal prion proteins into
abnormal ones, but this protein has yet to be identified.
Jay Mone'